SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #4

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #4

BATFISH

ALBERT LEA

Artimus sat at the bar looking like he had tried to swallow a cockroach and it was stuck in his throat.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“What’s the matter?” he exploded. “You sit here telling me a fucking story like that and then have the nuts to ask me what the matter is? Jesus Christ! I cannot fucking believe that you’re an escaped mental patient on top of all the other shit you’re on the run from.”

“Well, in a way I am and in a way I’m not.” I replied.

“What the hell is that suppose to mean?”

“I’m not crazy. I think. But I did escape.”

He shook his head in disgust and just stared at me. A couple of college babes on spring break had wandered in off of the beach and had sat down at the bar, so I made myself scarce for a second to take their order.

They both wanted a drink called a “Smelly Beaver” that was all the rage this year.

When I came back to Artimus’s side of the bar he appeared to have gotten his second wind.

“Both of those bimbos have decent racks.” He paused. “Hey! You never told me you were from Minnesota. All this time you’re from Minnesota and you never tell me? Shit man, I’m from right next door in the Dakotas. Do you realize how fucking homesick I get? And you don’t have the common decency to at least tell me you’re from the same neck of the woods so we could bullshit about it.”

The mental patient issue seemingly having dropped from his mind. 

That was another thing about Artimus. Very short attention span.

“Hey man, what town in Minnesota? I use to run a lot of dope through this shithole called Albert Lea.”

That “shithole” was my hometown. Albert Lea was named after some civil war colonel who got smoked at a big battle. Its biggest accomplishment is that it’s the hometown of Eddie Cochran, the 1950’s rock and roll star, who was killed at a very young age over in England. Car wreck or something. Summertime Blues.

Marion Ross from the show Happy Days supposedly is from there, too. She was Richie Cunningham’s Mom. But who gives a crap about that?

There had also been an incredibly cool murder in Albert Lea when I was growing up. But no one talks about it now. A local minister had been carrying on a torrid homosexual affair with a younger member of his parish. For reasons unknown, the young man had stabbed the minister about a million times and had dragged the body all over the county for a couple of days. He was the subject of a massive manhunt that the area has never seen the likes of since.

During that time my mother’s favorite way to keep me in her sight was to remind me that this maniac was on the loose. And to just think of horrors he would inflict on my young body once he caught me. Further evidence of her terrific parenting skills.

No wonder I had horrible nightmares all through my childhood. I still think that that murder would make a great John Waters film. Would really have put the town on the map.

Albert Lea has always had its own distinct smell. There was a packing plant in Albert Lea and the air always smelled like someone was taking a shit and smoking a White Owl cigar at the same time. You’ll never forget that smell once it hits the nostrils.

When I was a kid, the biggest thing going on was “dragging Broadway.” Just driving up and down the main drag of the town.

Well, not the biggest thing. The biggest thing was drinking and just like you said, Arty. Drugs If drinking was numero uno, then drugs were numero dos.

Albert Lea sits right at the intersection of Interstate highways 35 and 90 so it’s a natural location for drug trafficking. A lot of biker gangs hung around and meth was popular in old A. L. long before it became trendy but pot was king.

Albert Lea was where I acquired my taste for marijuana. I think you remember your first joint just like you remember your first piece of ass. I sure do. It was a massive red, white, and blue number and we smoked it right next to Billy Hawk’s garage. It was like smoking rubber.

Albert Lea was not exactly what you would call a racial friendly town either. Hispanics were tolerated because it was felt that they were good for the local economy. In other words they would take the jobs that no one else would take. But if you were black, beware. You better be out of town by sundown!

There had been at one time in the city’s history, a local chapter of the KKK, its offices located above the Woolworth’s store.

I feel truly fortunate to have had the chance to grow up in my formative years in an area filled with such culture, along with such kind and caring people.

Neither of my parents was from Albert Lea originally. My Dad was born just up the road in Faribault, Minnesota. His parents had both been employed at the state hospital there as ward attendants.

My grandfather was a mean son of a bitch. Strong as a rhino on steroids and he could back it up. For fun, he liked to go in the local taverns and beat the shit out of the first person who looked at him wrong. For money, he could knock out a horse with one punch. My grandmother weighed over three hundred pounds. All I remember about her is that she had tits the size of basketballs.

My mother was born in Plainfield, Wisconsin. The home of Ed Gein, the first famous serial killer. She actually had known him personally.

It was really her claim to fame, due to the fact that my grandmother was one of the bodies that Ed had dug up. My grandfather was a rambling, gambling man who one evening stepped out for a smoke and never came back.

My Dad was a Hoover vacuum cleaner/bible salesman, which was the first job(s) that he grabbed after he got out of the service after the big one, WWII. My Mom was a beautician who ran her own shop out of the basement of our house.

Dear father was offered Albert Lea as his territory shortly after they were married and they had lived in A. L. ever since.

The family house smelled like permanents, gin, and dog shit. They had three kids. In order of birth it was my sister, Lucy (named after Lucille Ball), my brother, Luther (named after Martin Luther, the religious guy, not the great guy), and me. Plus, our family dog, Skippy, a rat terrier.

Now that’s a whole different story. Skippy is my entire reason for believing in reincarnation. He had the unbelievable habit of roaming the neighborhood and either taking a crap or pissing on whatever he set his little brain to. If someone had just washed their car, Skippy would come over and take a leak on his clean tires. If someone had just rubbed mink oil on their prized leather golf bag and had left it in the sun to dry. Skippy would piss on it. He even walked into a neighbor’s house one time and took a leak on the family’s floor length curtains, which had just been bought that day. But his crowning achievement in life was for some reason he liked to back his little hairless asshole up to the windows of the neighbor’s basements and shit on the glass so that it stuck.

That little dude was doing some serious payback for being fucked over in an earlier life. Maybe he just liked the feel of cool glass on his bunghole. I don’t know. But I do know one thing. More than once I heard a scream of anguish or rage and would see Skippy running for life and some neighbor chasing him down.

He would eventually be bestowed the nickname of “Squirty” by the neighborhood. Skippy/Squirty died of a heart attack and I know that the only people in town who grieved for him were our immediate family, minus my Dad.

Dear old Dad wasn’t the kind of guy who would get all emotional over a dead dog. Dad had four passions in life: Selling suckers and Bibles, God, the Minnesota Twins, and Buckhorn beer. Not necessarily in that order.

During the baseball season, he and my mother would sit on the back porch and easily kill damn near a case of beer every night while listening to the Twins lose another game on a tiny transistor radio.

Both my parents are what you today would call functioning alcoholics. They could kill the better side of a case of brew along with a couple of shots of cheap bourbon and still pretty much carry on a normal

conversation.

Not that there hadn’t been a few slip ups. Dad once was burning trash while pie eyed and accidentally threw a box full of hairspray cans in the fire causing a fucking nuclear blast.

He was lucky that he wasn’t killed. The lid off that burn can blew 500 feet in the air and landed on a neighbor’s kid riding his bike down the street.

My mother and her sister once got so trashed on an August evening that they put sheets over their heads and went trick or treating in the neighborhood. My aunt was so bombed that she fell off a set of steps and cracked her head open.

It was all a thrill a minute for them, although my mother had lost a few customers when she took to having a few morning bracers before she gave some old broads their Lady Clairol dye

jobs.

In those days drunks were funny. Remember Otis on The Andy Griffith Show staggering around?

My poor sister reacted to these shenanigans by hiding in her room, reading movie magazines, practicing her cheers for cheerleading squad, and dreaming of the days to come when she would move to Minneapolis and lead a life of glamour. Her goal in life was to marry someone with money and drive a Buick.

My brother reacted with underage drinking, fast cars, felony theft, and assault of school teachers and anyone else who told him different. His goal in life was to be a bad ass or a prison snitch.

I just looked toward getting a meaningless high school diploma and leaving town. Hopefully, I would get laid at some point in that time frame. At that point in my life, that was all that mattered.

In then end we all got what we wanted, in a strange way that is.

Dad’s mind got so pickled on cheap Minnesota draft beer that he and God often sat talking to each other on the back porch. Remember that in the years to come the Twins would win two World Series titles. Maybe my Dad had something to do with that.

My mother had to close down her beauty shop after she really got tanked one morning on beer and tomato juice and wound up passing out in the middle of the floor while she was giving some old biddy a makeover. She then had plenty of time in her day to sit around and agree with whatever nonsense came out of my father’s cakehole.

My sister married a high school athletic star. They moved to Minneapolis where he had a full ride at the University of Minnesota. There he majored in football, pot smoking, and having lots of sex with both women and men, while she stayed at home and had his kids.

But it was my brother who really brought pride to the family name. He was sent to the state reform school at Red Wing, where he ran into a stainless steel shank in the shower room on his first day, when he refused to be the new shower boy toy.

The night before they took him away he had confessed to me that he had been laying the pork to two of the women who came to my mother’s beauty parlor. They were both in their late sixties! He should have been imprisoned for that alone.

He did leave me his titty magazine collection. There must have been two hundred dirty books and magazines hidden in my parent’s attic. They were under my mother’s wedding dress in a trunk.

And me? Early in my senior year I had smoked two huge joints of Colombian Gold and had gone to see the Navy flick The Last Detail.

That was all the convincing I had needed to go join the Navy.

By the way, I got finally got laid before I left. It just wasn’t as good as I thought it would be.

SCREAMING BATFISH #3

SCREAMING BATFISH BLUES #3

JUICE

NEW RICHLAND

His parents were as dead as Lincoln’s dick. Dad, literally. Mom, figuratively.

As dead as Chief Petty Officer (Retired) Jerome Wyatt. Who by the way had been born and raised but an hours drive south of his killer’s hometown in Mason City, Iowa. Talk about coincidences or a quirky fate.

New Richland, Minnesota had been a great town to grow up in. Less than two thousand for a population, it was a farming community set amongst the cornfields of southern Minnesota. Football games on Friday nights, church socials, summer carnivals, Mom and apple pie, all that happy horseshit.

Mohawk had a given name at that time. Long before he was given a new one by his government, his Christian name in those days was Jacob “Jake” Morrow.

His parents were Rick and Sandy Morrow and they had lived their entire lives within ten miles of New Richland, with the exception of the four years that Rick had served in the army. Rick had been an employee of the local grain elevator while Sandy had been a stay at home Mom.

When Rick returned from his stint with the army in Korea, he returned a different man. Something he had seen or done over there had gone horribly wrong, but he never would talk about it. To anyone. Not even

about all the medals he kept in a cigar box on top of his stroke books in his sock drawer. Gone was the church going honor roll student that everyone had been so proud of. In his place was a bitter, violent, hard drinking, and at times, whore chasing individual.

He was quick to anger and start to throwing fists, especially after a night with the bottle.

He and Sandy had married prior to Rick shipping out for Korea. She had gotten pregnant almost immediately after his return and they settled into a small house just

off the small downtown area of New Richland.

It was not a marriage made in heaven. After work, Rick enjoyed drinking with his buddies at the local tavern which had once been the towns bank, and on the weekends he got totally blasted while either watching the

Twins, North Stars, or the Vikings in action on television, depending on what sport was in season.

He also liked to hunt and fish, also while intoxicated. He was a rugged man’s man and even though he was incredibly obnoxious when drinking, he had no problem scoring with the town’s single and sometimes married women.

Sandy enjoyed staying at home and watching her soap operas while stuffing huge amounts of candy, cake, pudding, or any other sweet into her mouth. Along with her normal pregnancy weight gain she became enormous.

Things changed a little for the better after little Jake was born. Rick absolutely loved the little guy and had big dreams for his son. Being a complete Minnesota Viking maniac who drove a classic 65 Ford Mustang

painted Viking purple with the Viking horns decal in the rear window, Rick naturally wanted his son to grow up to become a member of the Minnesota Viking football club. He became obsessed with it. The first toy put in Jake’s crib was an official NFL “Duke” football.

Rick threw himself hog wild into the upbringing and molding of his son. He taught Jake to catch a full size football by the time he was four and had him running wind sprints in the back yard by the time he was seven. He was playing in the Pee Wee leagues by the next year and on his tenth birthday Rick bought him a sand filled weight set so he could start bulking him up.

Rich himself gave up drinking after work and only got wasted on the weekends while watching his games on TV. Not all of this was voluntary. He had been banished from attending the entire season of Jake’s second year of Pee Wee football after showing up blotto and calling a referee (who was also a local minister) a "blind as a bat cocksucker.”

He also had given up chasing women after narrowly avoiding being shot while dallying with a local married woman. Her husband had come home unexpectedly after leaving to go bowling in Waseca, he had forgotten his bowling glove, only to see his wife taking it from behind while leaning

against the kitchen table that his parents had given them for a wedding present.

He had rushed into the living room to grab his 12 gauge, which gave Rick the moment he needed to jump buck naked through a plate glass window. The enraged husband still took a wild shot at the fleeing Rick but succeeded in only killing seven of his neighbor’s homing pigeons nesting in their coop.

Rick now had a steady single piece, a truck stop waitress who lived over in Geneva. That was safer.

Sandy was by now a virtual shut in and weighed close to what a starting lineman would hit the scales at. It wouldn’t take much longer before she could be the subject of an article in the National Enquirer.

By the eighth grade, Jake had settled into his position as a defensive back on the junior high team. Along with the weight routine his father had him on (the family’s basement now had almost as much iron as the high school gym), three protein shakes a day, and his mother’s gigantic home cooked meals, Jake was now as big and buff as some college ballplayers.

And the boy could hit like a fucking mule kicks. He starched two wide receivers from Glenville in the first quarter of their game. One with a severe concussion. He had a natural instinct to go towards where the ball was being thrown. Interceptions didn’t matter to him. Only pure contact. A

hit was only good to him if snot flew out of both of their noses.

He didn’tcare if the receiver held onto the ball, if he fumbled, or even if his own bell got rang. He just wanted to hit. By his freshman year he was playing on the high school “A” squad and banging a cheerleader who was in her senior year. He didn’t bother to study; he had people doing his homework assignments for him.

Rick thought he was shitting in tall cotton he was so proud. After Jake was ejected in the game against Conger for clothes lining a running back who was stupid enough to run into Jake’s zone on a draw play, Rick went

out and bought Jake a copy of Jack Tatum’s They Call Me Assassin.

His pre-game meal was two chicken breasts, a baked potato, a small side of spaghetti with tomato sauce, and after an hour or two of digestion, five white cross and three cups of coffee. Just like the pros.

Although Rick loved his liquor and beer, he had no time or patience for people who used recreational drugs. By recreational he meant marijuana, acid, heroin, or coke. Speed did not fit in this category. Speed wasn’t a drug to Rick. It was just something that kept you awake so you could drink more beer or helped you get through the work day, or something that you gave to your teenage son before a big football game.

That other shit was for hippies and other degenerates. Rick had no problems getting his hands on any zip anytime he wanted it. His little brother Billy, was the biggest methamphetamine, pot, and Quaalude dealer in the county.

Billy was a veteran too. Vietnam. Three tours. All in a row. He would have stayed for another tour if it hadn’t been for the cobra that had bit him on his left hand causing him the loss of three of his fingers. He had been pillaging a Buddhist temple at the time for souvenirs and the little bastard had been coiled up and sleeping behind a shrine when Billy had disturbed him by dropping a religious statue on his tail. He could have

easily died but a chopper was already on its way to his platoon’s camp to chopper out a soldier who just had his testicles blown off by a bouncing betty.

He still spent over a month in a hospital in Saigon before being returned stateside. It was there that began his lifelong affair with pharmaceuticals.

Billy had loved Vietnam. You could do whatever you wanted over there. You could drink, do great drugs, screw all the women you wanted, and on top of it all, kill people. And no one could do a thing about it. Not that anyone cared anyway. It all had given him an incredible rush of power and a feeling of invincibility. He called it the “Juice.”

On the freedom flight home he had wept while everyone else had cheered hysterically when the pilot had announced that they were out of Vietnam air space. The stewardess had patted his shoulder affectionately. She thought he was weeping for joy.

After returning to New Richland, he had worked for a while at the corn cannery in Waseca to supplement his VA disability check, but soon found the monotony of a day to day job to be unbearable. Dealing drugs

was much more fun and profitable.

Soon he had bankrolled enough cash to buy a beautiful brand spanking new Harley-Davidson and was running with a biker gang out of Albert Lea called The Grim Reapers.

He was forced to take year and a day vacation in Stillwater State Prison for possession with intent to distribute, but his gorgeous wheel chair bound wife, Dawn, had ran the business for him while he was away. She was a natural with numbers and investing, and soon they owned a small farm, a four wheel

drive pickup, the previously purchased Harley, and a Winnebago motor

home which was specially equipped with an electric lift to get Dawn in and

out of.

She had had no problems dealing with the scrotum heads that they supplied their crank and downers to while he was away. Underneath the Mexican blanket she sat on was a chrome plate .357 magnum and after she had shot the dumb shit in the ass who had tried to walk out the door without paying for his gram of speed, word had gotten around fast.

It hadn’t taken Billy’s fellow Reapers long to find out where the guy that was walking

around with a .357 slug in his rectum lived and they had paid him a friendly visit by shining their boots on his rib cage.

Dawn was a tough nut. Billy had met her when she was dancing with a carnival strip show called Chez Paree at the Freeborn County fair in Albert Lea. Billy had gone to see the sprint car races that were held on the final night of the fair on its half mile horse track.

The track was not maintained at all during the course of the year and for the drivers it was almost suicidal to compete on it. But it drew enormous crowds who came to see if they might luck out and witness someone get killed, so their racing association booked them for the fair on an annual basis. After the races Billy had gone to the beer garden and had gotten incredibly wasted snorting crystal meth washed down with Grain Belt beer. It was his desire for a corndog smothered in mustard that drew Billy to the midway and to Dawn.

They had brought the girls out on stage to pump up the audience for the final show of the night. When Billy saw her up on the stage shaking her money maker and grinding away, he had forgotten the corndog and had paid his six bucks to see the show. It had long been a custom for the girls of Chez Paree to get totally naked for the last show of the night, even though in Freeborn County the rule was g-strings and pasties at all times.

Not to worry though since the local sheriff’s department had already been paid off.

Getting naked for the last set really got the local farm boys and packing plant workers all fired up and it was easy to talk them into the twenty five dollar blow jobs, even though they had to wear a rubber, that the girls gave after the show out in the trailers behind the tent.

Billy gladly paid the cash for a hummer from Dawn and after she got a taste of the dope he was carrying and saw the wad of cash in his pocket, it hadn’t taken him much to convince her to shitcan the glamour of the stage and to take off with him. Plus, he was a good friend of the owner of the local strip club, The Aragon, so she would never be lacking for employment.

The carny boss of Chez Paree was a little pissed when Dawn gave her ten second notice but was calmed down by a fifty, a gram of crystal, and the sight of Billy’s .38 Colt Detective Special stuck in his belt.

They were married a week later and while Billy dealt drugs, Dawn flashed her jugs (covered in pasties) to the local idiots of Albert Lea. It was easy work for her. Her own father had turned her into a prostitute at the age of thirteen by charging his drunken buddies for her and at eighteen she had

taken off with the show when it passed through Cairo, Illinois.

Billy treated her like a goddess and she only danced because she wanted to help contribute to their dream of living somewhere on the beach. After Vietnam, Billy couldn’t seem to handle the cold of Minnesota.

On a snowy Saturday night at the club she had unknowingly gotten the wife of a customer convinced that her husband was interested in more than just watching her dance. As Dawn had gathered up her clothes after her set and stepped down off the stage, the woman had come up from behind and stabbed her in the back with the sharpened end of a rat tail comb.

Dawn had been confined to a wheel chair ever since then. The woman assailant had been sentenced to fifteen years in Shakopee State Prison. Her husband meanwhile, was shot eight times and killed when he

was walking out the back door of a bar in Albert Lea called The Name Of The Game, almost a year to the day later. Billy was questioned for over ten hours but had an ironclad alibi. The murder case was kept open for years.

SALT ON THE NUTS: THE ADVENTURES OF A WHITE TRASH SAILOR #10

DECK APE 

This was a Cheech and Chong situation if I 

had ever seen one. The floor of the car I was sitting 
in, a Datsun 240Z, was absolutely littered with 
white cross. Speed. Uppers. Go-Fast. Whatever the 
hell the slang was for it then. The shit was 
everywhere. Must have been two hundreds hits 
spread all over the floor and the seats and between 
the spent bottles of Heineken. I was bent over in the 
passenger seat trying to pick the tabs out of the 
carpet, my eyes tearing up from the smoke from the 
lit Marlboro that was stuck in my mouth.

"Jesus Christ, Jay! If the fucking highway 
patrol pulls us over we're gonna wind up getting our 
assholes reamed in the Los Angeles County Jail. If we 
even get that far. Doesn't that sound like fun?"

Jay belted out that loud laugh of his. "Denny 
and I did a little partying last night. I forgot about 
the mess."

Denny was Dennis Barry, a good buddy of 
ours. Bar none the wildest son of a bitch I would 
ever meet in my life. With a short squat hairy body 
and huge stevedore arms, Dennis would stroll down 
the decks of the ship like a lost silverback gorilla, 
swinging those tree trunk arms of his. Good natured 
and funny when sober, shit in your pants funny 
when stoned, and short tempered and dangerous 
when drinking, Dennis was one of a kind. 

The son of a Hollywood film lot worker, Dennis planned on 
getting on at Fox Studios as soon as his enlistment 
ran out. It was amazing that he had lasted almost 
four years in the service. But amongst the non-lifers 
to the Dixie, Dennis had achieved God-like status. 
He had been assaulted by the Captain of our 
ship. And lived to tell the tale. Captain K. J. Bligh 
was a blowhard of epic proportions. 

A former football playing washout who had tried out with and 
miserably failed with the Green Bay Packers, Bligh 
was a huge lug of a man with a tiny head who 
favored wearing cowboy boots and carrying a silver 
six shooter in a monogrammed holster as he strutted 
around the ship like a deranged combination of 
George Patton and a fucking bandy rooster. 
Equipped with the brain the size of a pea, he was 
the never ending target of practical jokes from the 
crew which included having his engraved bowling 
ball thrown over the side which divers were unable 
to locate in the murky waters of Sand Diego Bay, 
calling his stateroom late at night: "Quit jacking off 
up there, Bligh," his sheets on his bunk short-sheeted 
constantly, mess cooks pissing in his coffee pot, and 
the almost daily theft of his sports section from the 
newspaper delivered to the door of his stateroom. 
Even though a football failure he lived vicariously 
through the box scores.

"Sons of bitches!" he would scream over the 
ships intercom as he stood on the bridge with spit 
flying out of his mouth. "Sons of bitch bastards! I 
want my fucking paper back right now or liberty is 
canceled for the crew for the next goddamn year." 
He would never get it back.

The ship was in dry-dock and was torn all to 
shit. It was like being stationed on Satan's private 
yacht. Smoke. Welding sparks flying everywhere. 
Flush one toilet it would back up two rows down on 
someone taking a crap - now that was funny! 
Hammers banging. With all the needle guns and 
knuckle-busters going as deck hands chipped off 
years of coats of paint you couldn't hear yourself 
think.

Dennis and I were up on the O-2 level of the 
ship up by officer's country, shirking from our 
duties as we smoked, Coked, and joked. With all the 
yard noise we were both wearing Mickey Mouse 
ears and were mostly just trying to read each other's 
lips. It was so fucking loud that we couldn't hear the 
ship's pipe, which is the Naval term for a 
loudspeaker announcement that Captain's Mast was 
about to begin. Captain's Mast being the equivalent 
to a civilian's misdemeanor court appearance. Only 
in the civilian world you aren't normally sentenced 
to 45 days restriction to a ship where you spend your 
nights scrubbing shit stains and cum tracks off of 
toilets.

Since we were wearing ear protection and 
you couldn't hear the goddamn announcement 
anyway we weren't expecting Captain Bligh, trailed 
by his cast of flunky officers, to come charging 
around the corner like a fucking maniac and hit 
Dennis with a block that I can guarantee the dumb 
bastard never threw as hard in the Packer's training 
camp. If he had he might have made the team. 
Dennis never saw it coming and went flying 
into the bulkhead (wall), bounced off it and came 
back with a cocked fist that he most likely would 
have broken the nose of his assailant with in any 
other set of circumstances, until he stunningly saw 
the commissioned moron standing in front of him.

"Goddamn you! Don't you know how to 
come to attention, asshole?" screamed Bligh. The 
spit of course flying out of his mouth again, 
spattering the front of Dennis's coveralls.

"I'll have your ass court martialed! I'll have 
you in the brig tonight sucking a Marine's cock!"

He turned and stormed off down the deck followed 
by his stunned henchman. Bligh had his time line all wrong. By that night Dennis's parents had secured the services of a 
top notch attorney. Within a month, Captain Bligh, 
who was in line for admiral had not only lost his 
command but was forced to retire. Fuck thinking 
about making Admiral.

Dennis was rewarded with an early 
honorable discharge and we all kept in touch after 
he got out.. But he wouldn't let the Bligh incident 
go. For sort of a hobby he had taken to calling Bligh 
late at night and tormenting him about the loss of 
his command and promotion. Dennis had a buddy at 
Ma Bell who kept getting Bligh's phone number 
when he kept changing it. Within a year, Dennis 
would be dead of a morphine overdose. Bligh 
eventually capped himself with his service revolver. 

In his typical fuckup style he wasn't successful and 
spent his remaining years in a veteran's nursing 
home.

***

"Fucking A! There's even some black 
beauties and a hit of ...shit this looks like a tab of 
blotter acid," I yelled out in glee. "This is gonna be 
a fun drive I can see." I popped the top on the only 
remaining full beer, warm, and washed down a 
white cross, a black beauty, and the tab of acid. 
The year was 1979 and our ship, the USS 
Dixie, was home-ported out of San Diego. The ship 
had been in a major overhaul at Todd Shipyard in 
San Pedro when Jay and I had met.

Since then, the ship had finished up it's overhaul early - which is 
another epic story in itself and had cruised back on 
down to San Diego. Jay and I drove back to LA 
almost every weekend together. He owned and lived 
in a apartment complex in Hollywood. I had kept 
my apartment in Long Beach when the ship 
returned to San Diego and commuted on weekends 
and days off. I planned on living in Los Angeles 
when my enlistment ran out. It had been slightly 
over a year since I had left Hawaii. It had been the 
only year of my time in the Navy that had been 
relatively calm. Although I still worried about 
Brewer talking about the NIS incident, it was filed 
farther back in my mind. The briefcase rested 
comfortably in a safe deposit box in Long Beach.

The Dixie hadn't been a bad ship to finish up 
my tour of the Navy on. It was a destroyer tender. A 
huge floating hulk with dozens if not hundreds of 
shops on it. Any Navy ship, destroyer class or 
smaller, could tie up alongside of her and get damn 
near any problems it had taken care of. It rarely got 
underway so the many of the crew lived off of the 
ship. It was a den of thieves, drug dealers, drunks, 
and Navy castoffs - a typical post Viet Nam Navy 
vessel. I had laid low my year onboard the ship but 
had witnessed hundreds of drug deals, busts, 
assaults, and even an attempted male on male rape. 
Recently four crewman had been arrested for 
hanging out along the Mexico border, which was 
just a few miles away, and robbing illegal aliens as 
they crossed the border.

"Hey man! Check it out, dude. That new 
guy is Beaver from that television show." There was 
new meat laying a fresh coast of paint on the 
anchor. I had walked over and taken a look at him. 
Negative. I walked back over to the guy spreading 
the scuttlebutt. "You're full of shit, Jimmy. That's 
definitely not Jerry Mathers." Jimmy was Jimmy 
Carnahan, a pasty skinned little fart that liked to 
paste a sign up in the bus windows every night 
when the lifers bussed us back to the barracks. 
Same goddamn message every night. "Girls - show 
us your tits!!" The little bastard drove me nuts. 
"Hey new guy," I shouted. "What's your 
name?"

"Jay ******," Jay had shouted back like he 
hadn't given a shit who he was and had turned back 
to his coat of battleship gray.

I looked back to Jimmy. "****** The 
******, not Leave It To Beaver, dumbass. Two 
different shows and two different people." Jimmy 
tore off towards the stern of the ship to spread his 
hot new gossip, probably stopping off at a head to 
wax his cane as he was a well known and notorious 
shipboard masturbator.

***

Jay started up the car and pulled out of the 
parking lot like he was late for a date with a five 
hundred dollar prostitute with a purse full of 
Bolivian blow and I banged the top of my head on 
the glove box in the process.

"You're sure getting short, aren't you? Shit, man. That's fucking great."

"Couple more days, man. I'm short. Short as 
a motherfucker." Short was short for short-timer. 
Military slang that meant my enlistment was soon to 
expire. My time ran out the following week and I 
had enough leave to burn out the rest of my 
enlistment. My shipboard days were done. This 
would be the last time Jay and I would be making 
the LA run together. I rubbed the bump already 
growing on the top of my head.

"Stop at a liquor store before you get on the 
highway so we can score some beer for our long 
journey. I think we'll need some with all this speed 
in the car. We might wind up with a bit of the 
proverbial cottonmouth."

Jay pulled over at a package store and I ran 
in. Throwing two twelve packs of Holland's finest 
and a couple of packs of Swisher Sweet cigars onto 
the counter, I perused the stack of skin magazines, 
always looking for lesbians pictorials, while I 
waited for the clerk to ring out the customer ahead 
of me.

"Would you like to share that beer with me? 
We could have a party, you and me." I looked up to 
see a black wino leering at me. He had a big booger 
hanging out of his nose and bleeding chapped lips 
that he was smacking at me. Bathing also didn't 
appear to be a high priority on his list. "I'll blow 
you for a beer," he whispered. The dirty old 
degenerate looked eerily familiar. 

Just in case in might need it, I reached into 
my back pocket and felt for my folding Buck knife 
which was standard issue for sailors in those days.

"Get the fuck out of here you old rummy," 
hollered the clerk who was obviously retired Navy 
by the faded tattoos on his forearms. "Fucking class 
of people we get around here these days," he 
muttered as he shoved two jugs of Thunderbird into 
a paper bag and handed them to the drunk. "Now 
get the hell out of here you smelly old bastard."

The wino followed me out the door staying 
about five feet back. I turned around and faced him. 
"What in the hell is your problem, asshole?"

He had an evil grin on his face. "I know you. 
You was in my last company. Your ass is in hot 
water, boy. Hot motherfucking water! I've had 
people who came to talk to me about you. Bad 
motherfuckers, too. Been looking for your ass. 
Gonna put a cap in your ass someday, that's for 
motherfucking sure."

"What the hell are you talking about? What 
company? What bad motherfuckers?" Who the hell 
was this guy? Looked just like another San Diego 
alky to me but still eerily familiar.

"Less than a goddamn year and they kick 
my ass out. I lose my pension, Everything. Just 
cause some boot can't keep his mouth shut. Could 
have been you. Maybe you was the one that talked."

I stood there silently looking at the wreck in 
front of me. Then it registered! My boot camp 
commander. Only four years had passed since I had 
seen him. Laying back in his chair with a recruit 
named Murphy kneeled in front of him. The passing 
of time had not been kind to this wretch. I tossed a 
five dollar bill down on the sidewalk and walked 
quickly to the car.

"I don't need your charity you prick! Look at 
me! This could be you! This may be your future!"

I jumped in the car and threw the beer onto 
the floorboard. 

Jay looked at me oddly. "What in the hell 
was that all about?"

"Did I ever tell you about that time in boot 
camp when I saw that recruit blowing the...." 
Jay's laugh echoed out the windows as he 
headed on to the on ramp.

I turned around in my seat and looked back 
at the liquor store. Former Navy Chief Jackson was 
standing in the middle of the street. Giving me the 
finger. I uneasily settled back into the passenger 
seat. What did he mean? Bad motherfuckers? Who 
was looking for me? I once more felt the need to 
disappear. Disappear into the mist. 

I'VE GOT THOSE OLD VOMIT ON THE 

SHOES BLUES 

The dream was back. It usually came in the 
nights when I had drank too much and kicked in at 
the point when the body's blood sugar is altered and 
drops as it is effected by the amount of demon rum 
pumping through it's veins, heart, and brain. First 
the eyes snap open. Looking at the clock you 
realized you've only been asleep a few hours. You 
already feel the start of a hangover. Terrible 
cottonmouth. The dreaded hot pipes. You need a 
drink of water but don't get out of bed. You need to 
piss but you don't stir. Your eyes close. You start to 
drift off. The snakes and spiders in your brain start 
to stir and to move about.

The dream is about Rose. It almost always 
is. You now know that Rose is dead. Or worse. A 
year or so ago you called a buddy of yours back in 
Hawaii. Big time weed dealer on the island. A Navy 
guy that got into the business while stationed in 
Pearl Harbor and decided to stay after his hitch 
ended. He's always full of colorful stories, 
information, and gossip. Which is one of the 
reasons you call him. That and to check up on the 
past.

Janine has found Jesus and changed her 
cock chasing ways and is now the secretary to the 
Pearl Harbor Chaplain. A huge drunk. The chaplain 
not Janine.

Chief Mason dropped dead of a heart attack 
at work. "That guy was a prick with ears." Old 
news.

Then he tells you that Rose came back to 
Hawaii. Somehow she was still in the Navy. Some 
big wig admiral on the island liked that pussy so 
much that he pulled some strings and got her reassigned 
to his staff. Then one day she disappeared. 
The kind of disappeared that involves being ground 
up and fed to the sharks or buried in a shallow 
grave. The rumor going around is the old Admiral 
flipped out and beat poor Rose to death over some 
weird sex thing gone wrong. Supposedly a couple 
of enlisted pukes took care of the dirty work for the 
feeble prick.

In the dream, which is always the same, you 
walk into Rose's apartment. You call out her name. 
Your looking for Reggie but will fuck Rose if she's 
willing. The place is dark, disheveled, and smells of 
death. When you call out her name, she answers 
from the bedroom. The bedroom is even darker than 
the living room, lit only by a candle. A black 
candle. Rose is sitting on the bed. Naked. Her body 
is emaciated. Her face is battered and covered in 
dried blood. Her eyeballs have eight ball 
hemorrhages. She looks at you as she plays with 
herself and beckons you to come to her with her 
free hand. When she smiles at you, you can see that 
her teeth are rotted and stained like she's been 
chewing betel nut. Like an old Viet Namese whore.

Sometimes you wake up screaming. 
Not this time. A loud clicking noise wakes 
me. It's my answering machine shutting down after 
taking a message. I had turned down both machine's 
volume and the telephone's ringer. Even though I 
had been a full time, dues paying member of the 
longshoreman's union for almost three years I was 
still considered a rookie. So if a ship came in 
unexpectedly on a weekend - this was a Saturday 
morning - I was often called in for the unloading, 
hence the answering machine which I fucking 
hated. 

The sun was coming through the only 
window of my shitty studio apartment - one room 
that holds a bed, ratty couch from the Salvation 
Army, small stove and refrigerator, television, and a 
tiny bathroom off to the side. My hangover appears 
to be bad but not crippling and I painfully roll over 
and discover that I still have company from last 
night. A cute, chubby Mexican gal named Felicia, a 
waitress from the bar that is just across the street 
from my apartment. One of those bars that is so 
ancient and so nasty that it doesn't even have a 
name any longer. 

For some reason it used to be called "The Gong" but now is just referred to as "The Place." She's laying on her back and has her 
mouth wide open as she snores softly. The sheet is 
pulled down just below her belly button, exposing a 
beautiful pair of jugs. This is her third or fourth 
time at my place. She's in the country illegally, 
speaks very little English, and sends home money 
faithfully every month to her husband and two 
children who live back somewhere deep in the 
interior of old Mexico. I recall drinking shots of 
tequila chased by iced down bottles of Pabst Blue 
Ribbon - a nasty combination - with Felicia and the 
bar's cadaverous-looking owner, Rocky. Rocky had 
been an old time pornographer back in the fifties 
and had actually served time in San Quentin for 
producing and distributing a film of two women 
getting it on with a large pig.

I gently run my hands across Felicia's breast 
and then down to her bush. She is truly a beauty and 
I sincerely wish that she wasn't married. She sighs, 
mumbles something in Spanish that sounds like 
"knock it off, fuckstick" and rolls over on to her 
side and resumes her snoring. I roll over back to my 
side of the bed and sit up with my feet on the floor.

The alarm clock tells me that it's ten o'clock. By 
union rules I have two hours to respond to their call. 
I grab my pack of Camels and light one up with my 
battered Zippo. I sit and stare at the lighter for 
several seconds. It has my old Navy ship, the USS 
Dixie, inscribed on it, the only keepsake I have 
from my days in the military except for my 
honorable discharge certificate. Standing up I 
shuffle over to the small refrigerator and get out a 
can of beer. Testing the waters I gently sip it. Tasty. 
The old hair of the dog. It seems like everything is 
going to be all right. 

I think I'll call the dock office and take a sick day. They won't be able to say much since this will be my first and then I'll take Felicia out for brunch and then maybe we'll got to the 
beach later. She loves the beach. I take my cigarette 
and beer and sit down on the couch and pull out the 
answering machine from under the couch. One call 
is waiting to be listened to. I turn the volume up 
slightly and hit play:

There's a pause then a coughing jag. I about 
shit the couch when I hear the voice. 

"Hey, asshole. Long time no see. I just wanted to let you know that 
I got some bad news yesterday. My old man got 
shanked up at Stillwater. The poor old fucker died 
in the prison infirmary before they could an 
ambulance out to the prison. Bad fucking way to go. 
Seventy some years old and a nigger runs a 
sharpened up piece of plastic through you. Shit! 
Anyway, that means all bets are off. I know that my 
old man and yours used to be tight but as you can 
see, those days are fucking over. So I hired a private 
detective to look you up. Didn't take too fucking 
long since you left quite a trail. Plus, we have a 
mutual acquaintance. A little birdy in Leavenworth 
prison. He got hold of me and said you he had some 
information about you. That made things a lot easier 
for the dick I hired. So anyway. Here's the deal you 
miserable little prick. You got two weeks to come 
see me. If you're one goddamn second late I'm 
going out to your dad's house and break both his 
fucking legs and burn his house down with him in 
it." There was some wheezing laughter. "Just like 
what happened to your buddy. Mike was his name 
wasn't it? And I've got another nice little tidbit for 
you. I just discovered that you have an older brother 
who's married and has two beautiful children. I 
never knew that before. They live down in Florida. 
Pensacola I believe. Very successful couple. Pity 
for anything to happen to them because you're such 
a fuckup. You can leave a message for me at the 
Aragon Bar. Have a nice day."

I almost jumped out of my skin when the 
hands touched my back. I whirled around to find 
Felicia standing, still naked behind me. She looked 
at me quizzically.

"Problem?"

"Yes, baby. Big fucking problem." 

I leaned over and put my head in my hands. 
It was time to pay up. I looked back up a Felicia 
who was looking at me with genuine concern in her 
eyes. I wished to God I could just crawl into bed 
with her and never have to go anywhere again.

"I have to go home for a while. But on 
Monday I need you to go to the bank with me. I 
have a safety deposit box there. I'm going to put 
your name on the access list so that you can get a 
key to it."

To be continued....

SALT ON THE NUTS: THE ADVENTURES OF A WHITE TRASH SAILOR #5

MEMORIES OF WHITE TRASH TOWNS 

ALONG WITH PROMISES OF ASIAN SEX 

AND BRYLCREEM HANDJOBS 

"You'll get all the slant eyed pussy you can 
shake a stick at," leered my recruiter with a tobacco 
juiced grin as he groped himself through his 
polyester trousers and mimed what I imagined by 
the grease on his pumpkin shaped head was a 
Vitalis lubed hand job. Fuck the good training and 
travel! Obviously sex with hot, young Asian women 
was this recruiter's top recruiting tool.

"Fuck yes!" I had screamed out as I got 
caught up in the moment. 

My recruiter, Don, was oily and unpleasant, 
with beady little pig-like eyes, an alcohol flush to 
his face, gin blossomed nose, and seriously 
overweight - like a hundred fucking pounds. He 
leaned back into his chair which groaned under the 
pressure and lit up an unfiltered KOOL while letting 
out a thundering fart at the same time. The entire 
room immediately stunk of rotten eggs.

"Just wait until you get to the P. I., that's the 
Philippine Islands to you landlubbers," he coughed 
out, "the whores down there will jack you off and 
use Brylcreem for lubricant. Much better than 
Vaseline." 

Brylcreem and not Vitalis for lubricant! 
Well, some sort of old man hair tonic, so I had been 
close. 

The recruiter lifted his hands and looked up 
to the nicotine stained tile ceiling as if he was 
welcoming little baby Jesus down from Heaven. 
"Nothing finer than a Brylcreem hand-job. And you 
won't catch the black clap going that way either."

That would be the first of countless times 
that I would hear about the dreaded "Black Clap." 
Usually you would hear it after you bragged or lied 
to one of your shipmates about some broad you had 
banged the night before. The shipmate would be 
jealous that you had gotten some pussy and he 
hadn't so he would throw this fairy tale your way. 
The story was almost always the same. Some sailor 
in Thailand or San Francisco, the location doesn't 
matter, picks himself up a whore and catches a case 
of the dose. Only when the corpsman diagnoses it, 
he gives the sailor the bad news, but not before he 
calls the Shore Patrol who slap the cuffs on him 
because of what he's about to hear. They have to 
handcuff him you see because they news he is about 
to hear is going to drive him apeshit and he'll try to 
kill everybody in his general vicinity. He has the 
Black Clap and it can't be cured. All the penicillin 
and tetracycline in the world won't help him so he's 
like fucking Typhoid Mary but more like Gonorrhea 
Gary. He's contagious as a son of a bitch so they 
ship him off to some mysterious island never to be 
heard from again - I would imagine that there's a lot 
of cornholing going down on that island with all 
those infected horny sailors running around - no 
women to hump and they're all gonna die anyway. 

He would be reported to be lost at sea, killed in 
action, or some other line of crap to his parents and 
they would get paid off with his military life 
insurance (SGLI) so they wouldn't ask any nosy 
questions. Before I had walked into the recruiter's 
office the only thing I knew about the Navy came 
from two things: I had seen the movie The Last 
Detail with Jack Nicholson last winter. Jack is a 
sailor's sailor in that flick. Boozing, brawling, 
banging chicks, smoking reefer, and Jack even tells 
a jarhead officer who runs the brig to go fuck 
himself. So that was cool. 

And the second thing was this comic fuck book that my brother got from an uncle of ours who had been on a trip down to 
Juarez, Mexico. My brother had kept it hidden 
under his socks in his dresser drawer but I found it 
when I was looking for some loose change and 
cigarettes. The comic book had these drawings of 
Popeye the sailor man and his slut Olive Oyl 
fucking in all these wild positions. Popeye had this 
huge crank and Olive's beaver was real hairy, not 
like that shaved shit that's all the rage in the porno 
industry these days. I know it was just a comic book 
but goddamn! If that's what sailors get to do - bring 
it the hell on!

Don had been so excited that I wanted to 
sign and ship out that day that he had blown off the 
standard police check with a conspiring wink. Three 
hours and a ass-load of signed papers later I was on 
a bus headed for Minneapolis and the armed forces 
enlistment center. Unfortunately for me the first 
stop on the bus route (I had dumped the Vega in the 
parking lot of a roller rink) was just where I had run 
from. As the Greyhound pulled into the station I slid 
down low in my seat.

Albert Lea, Minnesota. My hometown and 
scene of the crime. At that time home to the 
Wilson's meat packing plant, the town of 20,000 
had a constant funk about it, courtesy of Wilson's, 
that smelled like a bathroom right after someone 
had taken a huge crap while smoking a White Owl 
cigar. You literally could not open the bedroom 
windows on many summer evenings because of the 
stench.

Eddie Cochran, the fifties rock and roll star, 
had grown up in Albert Lea and I can goddamn 
guarantee you that he was not thinking about the 
city when he wrote Summertime Blues. Marion 
Ross, of Happy Days fame, had also spent some 
time there. But they were the far and few between 
of the town. 

The majority of the population were 
employed by the packing plant until they would 
eventually be run out of their jobs by vicious labor 
strikes, carpal tunnel syndrome, the red meat high 
cholesterol hysteria, and cheap Mexican labor. It 
didn't help that only twenty miles away was the 
town of Austin, the home of Hormel which is the 
birthplace of Spam - the all time leading seller in 
the canned crap food aisle of your local grocer. It's 
the meal made up of pig and cattle intestines, lips, 
assholes, and scrap meat the janitor shovels up off 
the floor, all packed in a tidy little brick and shoved 
in a tin can with a glob of gelatin to preserve it. 
Traitors in Albert Lea bought the shit up and fried it 
in the pan for Sunday morning breakfast adding to 
the overall stench of the town.

Humid and as hot as the gates of Hell in the 
summer with mosquitoes buzzing in your face 
constantly, it then got down to freeze your nuts off 
cold in the winter, the place was no picnic to live in. 
With weather conditions like that, the main source 
of entertainment was alcohol, and lots of it (along 
with suicide since Nordic blooded people just seem 
to love to shove a shotgun in their mouth in the 
winter - Finland has nothing on Minnesota in that 
department). Beer for hot summer days, vodka and 
whiskey for the cold and dark winter nights. The 
folks of Minnesota are known for their hardy stock 
and love of liquor. A relative of mine had been 
known to crawl under Model-T Fords back in the 
day and drink the alcohol used for anti-freeze 
straight out of the radiator.

Savvy Minnesotans who didn't relish the 
taste of gun oil in their mouths to hasten their quest 
for the big sleep had many other fun options. 
Snowmobiles became popular and along with the 
booze came high speed accidents involving barbed 
wire fences and decapitations, a sort of polar Jayne 
Mansfield accident if you will. Drunks drove their 
cars on to the frozen lakes to ice fish and wound up 
falling through open holes in the ice, some not seen 
again until spring found their bodies bobbing to the 
surface. A lunatic decided to blow a car through the 
ice with dynamite when the local country club put 
the junked auto out there for a lottery - a Minnesota 
tradition, the person who picks the day and time 
wins a prize! The dumb shit didn't know how to 
handle explosives and blew his ass all over Fountain 
Lake. The owner of the ambulance service, a four 
hundred pound mouth breather, uttered the quote - 
most likely bullshit - retold around the town for 
years when he scooped the man's brains up off the 
ice and asked "Does anybody want a set of brains? 
Never been used." 

It was then and still is, a dead end town. The 
typical southern Minnesota town half full of 
churches, the other half bars and strip joints. Sneak 
in to the Aragon Bar or The Name of the Game - a 
filthy beyond belief bar with the biggest 
cockroaches I had ever seen until I got to Hawaii - 
on a Saturday night to watch sad eyed and coked up 
strippers wearing g-strings and pasties as they 
humped the fire-pole and then you could 
conveniently go listen to the reverend the next 
morning and forget all about how your old lady 
screamed so fucking loud the glass in the windows 
almost busted out in the trailer and you had to sleep 
on the Sears not paid for couch when she 
discovered you had shot your wad in your pants 
after you had gotten so worked up and had blown 
half or all of your paycheck that you earned 
slaughtering hogs and calves on some cheap sluts 
from Minneapolis shaking their asses. Sins 
absolved! Just like that.

You know that kind of town if you're from 
that godforsaken part of the country. The kind of 
town freezes its ass for eight months of the 
years just waiting for (hopefully) four months of 
spring and summer. Summer brings on fishing, long 
walks, movies at the drive in, root beer at the A & 
W, and the county fair with it's dangerously unsafe 
rides, rip-off games, demolition derbies, and 
suicidal sprint car drivers racing on the old beat up 
old horse track while the fans bombed on 3.2 beer 
watch intently just hoping that tonight might be 
their night to witness a fatal crash. 

Afterwards they stagger out to the midway, pausing only to barf their beer and foot longs behind the Tilt a Whirl (built 
locally just down the road over in Faribault), to 
catch the "exotic" Chez Paree strip show imported to the 
town by the tattooed covered carnies. Just like the 
burned out whores uptown in the bars only these 
gals is different. They come from Iowa or 
Arkansas! Foreign gals. Ten bucks for a blow job 
after the show. If you don't get your head bashed in 
for your wallet first by her carnie pimp. 

Goddamn! I was sure going to miss the 
place.

To be continued....